A prominent Catholic bishop and a priest in Togo have been told they were targeted by spyware made by the private surveillance firm NSO Group, in the first known case of its kind involving members of the clergy. A joint investigation by the Guardian and the French newspaper Le Monde can reveal that Bishop Benoît Alowonou and five other critics of Togo’s repressive government were alerted by WhatsApp last year that their mobile phones had been targeted with the spying technology. Four of those targets agreed to be named: Bishop Alowonou, a priest named Pierre Chanel Affognon, Raymond Houndjo, a close associate of a leading opposition politician, and Elliott Ohin, a former government minister who is in the opposition party. While it is not known who perpetrated the attacks against the Togolese targets, some of the victims have said they believed the Togolese government was likely to have been behind the surveillance effort. A 2018 Citizen Lab report said Togo was one of five African countries where a possible operator of NSO Group technology was active. WhatsApp announced last year that 1,400 of its users were attacked with the malware, which is made by Israel’s NSO Group, over a two-week period last April. Individuals who are known to have been told by WhatsApp that they were targets of the attack are now known to include politicians who support Catalonian independence in Spain, journalists in India and Morocco, and political activists from Rwanda.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN